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A Woman in Stone Or in the Heart of Man?

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A Woman in Stone Or in the Heart of Man? Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics Volume 4 Issue 1 Article 2 2014 A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? Michele M. Schumacher [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity ISSN: 1839-0366 COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING This material has been copied and communicated to you by or on behalf of the University of Notre Dame Australia pursuant to part VB of the Copyright Act 1969 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Recommended Citation Schumacher, Michele M. (2014) "A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man?," Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? This article is available in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/2 Schumacher: Navigating Between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? Navigating Between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor1 Michelle Schumacher “What good is the poet in barren times?” (Friedrich Hölderlin)2 In an encyclical whose purpose is “to reflect on the whole of the church’s moral teaching, with the precise goal of recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied,”3 one would expect—in keeping with tradition—that emphasis would be upon the “good [that] is to be done and pursued and [the] evil [that is] to be avoid.”4 What is particularly surprising in the approach of Pope John Paul II, then, is his focus upon truth and beauty, as the very name of the encyclical implies: Veritatis Splendor.5 “Why is the ‘splendour of truth’ so important?” John Paul II asks within the context of his 1994 Letter to Families. First of all, by way of contrast: the development of contemporary civilization is linked to a scientific and technological progress which is often achieved in a one-sided way, and thus appears purely positivistic. Postivisim, as we know, results in agnosticism in theory and utilitarianism in practice and in ethics. In our own day, history is in a way repeating itself. Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of “things” and not of “persons”, a civilization in which persons are use in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members.6 Or, as the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar prophetically describes this utilitarian world, it is “a world without women, without children, without reverence for the form of love in poverty and humility, a world in which everything is viewed solely in terms of power or profit-margin, in which everything that is disinterested and gratuitous and useless is despised, persecuted, and wiped out, and even art is forced to wear the mask and the features of technique.”7 What Balthasar herein recognizes as the consequence of the separation of nature and grace (or of divine and human causality), at least within the confines of much of contemporary thought, might also be formulated in terms of the typically modern conflict 1 Also published in Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1249–86. 2 “… wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit” (From “Brot und Wein”) 3 John Paul II, Encyclical letter on “the Splendor of Truth,” Veritatis Splendor (August 6, 1993), no. 4. 4 St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2. 5 See Veritatis Splendor, no. 51, where John Paul II teaches that “to perfect himself in his specific order,” the human person must not only “do good and avoid evil,” but he must also “seek truth, practice good and contemplate beauty.” 6 John Paul II, Gratissimam Sane (2 February, 1994), no. 13. 7 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, translated by David C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 142. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 1 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 2 between human freedom and natural necessity.8 Such is also the origin of the modern idea of selfhood, resulting, as Louis Dupré observes, “either in a naturalist or in an idealist conception of the person.”9 Both sides […] found it hard to preserve genuine otherness. A self-reduced to a meaning-giving function—a mere subject—loses its personal identity and, as a result, is no longer able to recognize the identity of the other. […] Likewise, if the self is merely a substance [in a Cartesian sense] albeit it a distinct one, it becomes absorbed within an objective totality that admits no real otherness.10 Hence, as Kenneth Schmitz summaries, otherness is understood either “in terms of conflict (dialectics) or equivocity (deconstruction).”11 In the second sense, “The lonely man of today meets in the ‘thou’ only himself; he is,” Balthasar observes, “more narcissistic than ever before in the history of mankind.”12 A way beyond this impasse—that of “the sharp subject-object division characteristic of modern philosophical anthropology”—is, Dupré suggests, recourse to the ideas of beauty and harmony: ideas which “do not allow themselves to be explained in either of those terms, even though aesthetic theories kept hesitating between the two, leaning at first more to the objective and later to the subjective side.”13 As for Blessed John Paul II, he follows the example of Christ in his dialogue with the rich young man (cf. Mt 19:16) by making “an appeal to the absolute good which attracts us and beckons us” as the “echo of a call from God, who is the origin and goal of man’s life.”14 As such, it is also an appeal to human freedom, insofar as it is understood—in the classic (pre-modern) sense—as “rooted in the soul’s spontaneous inclinations to the true and the good,”15 whence also his appeal to beauty: the shining forth (splendour) of the truth so that it might be savoured by the senses of sight and sound.16 In the profound words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 8 This modern tension between nature and freedom is fittingly portrayed by Michael Allen Gillespie in terms of the conflict between Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, whom Gillespie presents as “prototypical modern thinkers” (The Theological Origins of Modernity [Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2008], 262). 9 Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2004), 76-77. 10 Ibid., 76. See also idem, The Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 118-19. “The conceptual apparatus of modern thought, including much theology,” Dupré argues elsewhere, “has come to rest on the assumption that the subject-object opposition must be recognized as an ultimate” (idem, Metaphysics and Culture, The Aquinas Lecture, 1994 [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994], 57). 11 Kenneth Schmitz, “Created Receptivity and the Philosophy of the Concrete,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997), 339-71, here 361. 12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The God Question and Modern Man, with foreword by John Macquarrie, translated by Hilda Graef (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), 106. 13 Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, 76. 14 Veritatis Splendor, no. 7. 15 Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, translated by Mary Thomas Noble from the third edition (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 333. “For St. Thomas,” Pinckaers explains, “the natural inclinations to goodness, happiness, being and truth were the very source of freedom. They formed the will and intellect, whose union produced free will.” (ibid., 245). 16 See, for example, ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad. 1. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/2 2 Schumacher: Navigating Between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor “The form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed. […] The appearance of the form, as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths. […] We “behold” the form; but, if we really behold it, it is not as a detached form, rather in its unit with the depths that make their appearance in it. We see form as the splendour, as the glory of Being. We are “enraptured” by our contemplation of these depths and are “transported” to them.”17 What is thus proposed for our appropriation by Veritatis Splendor is a profoundly realist (or creational) perspective: one which affirms the goodness—and thus also the beauty—of things in themselves, and not simply from the perspective of the human subject, as goes the expression: beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
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